Ten Principles for Conducting a Successful Job Search Campaign

Answers to the questions you haven’t been afraid to ask me.

I’m Ron Bates, Managing Principal of Executive Advantage Group. We’ve been specializing in executive search and leadership transformation consulting since 2001. Our retained search closure and repeat business rates far exceed industry averages, and we attribute our success to unique best practices and exceptional network-driven methodology. We have the largest candidate reach of any search firm in the world.

I personally have almost 30 years of experience in this field, and as you can imagine, I get a lot of questions from candidates about how to conduct an effective job search. In fact, chances are pretty good you’re reading this right now because you recently asked me a question or two about your own job search. This article is a compilation of action steps I know work - use them to increase your chances of finding more - and better - career opportunities. I see them work all the time, and over the years I’ve heard back from thousands of candidates who confirm it.

If you or someone you know needs or wants to conduct job search campaign, taking these steps will have impact. Simply stated, they improve your ability to be in the right place at the right time to take that next step in your career. How? Because the outcome of a job search is often a function of timing. Using my suggestions will increase your marketability and exposure to opportunity, which will improve your chances of being in the right place at the right time to take that next step in your career.

It Still Starts with Your Resume:
There's a very simple measurement of a resume's value - it either opens doors or it doesn't. It has to be “pin sharp,” concisely articulating the scope of each position you've held in your career, and the business impact your efforts have produced - in quantifiable terms. If your resume doesn’t do this…

Use Resume Distribution Services
There are hundreds of job posting sites out there, all with different information and formatting requirements, which can make managing your resume postings a very time-consuming process. Resume distribution services give you the ability to manage all of your resume postings from one convenient site/interface…

Manage Your Time Efficiently
Decide how often to send out your resume to the different populations you’re targeting. Connect with a given number of recruiters or hiring authorities/executives on a regular basis, but be careful not to spend too much time with any one person if there is no identified job opportunity to discuss. Don't get sucked into…

Reward Yourself and Take Breaks
Conducting a proactive job search can be one of the most stressful and frustrating jobs experiences you’ve ever had. Like with any job, you need to take breaks and have some balance maintain fresh perspective, stay focused, and keep your determination and spirits up. Reward yourself for…

Many job searchers have told me the information in this article helped them greatly. I hope it helps you, too - and if you believe it will help others, please forward the link to them. And let me know how I can help going forward - by email, of course!

There's a very simple measurement of a resume's value – it either opens doors or it doesn't. It has to be “pin sharp,” concisely articulating the scope of each position you've held in your career, and the business impact your efforts have produced - all in quantifiable terms. If your resume doesn’t do this, don’t bother sending it.

Your Resume Shouldn’t Look Like Everyone Else’s
If you’re trying to differentiate yourself, it’s not a good idea to have a resume that looks like everybody else's. Give serious thought to abandoning the traditional 1 - 2 page resume format. Focus instead on using enough physical space to adequately differentiate your career. Why? Because if you try to jam your career value proposition into a 1 - 2 page resume, then you risk being lost in a sea of 1 - 2 page resumes.

If you want to give yourself an advantage in the resume-noticing game, simply ask yourself if you want to work for someone that believes the length of someone's resume is valid hiring criteria. Be very careful about reacting to feedback that "your resume is too long." Why? Because the only person whose opinion counts is someone that can actually benefit by hiring you. Any feedback that comes from someone that does not need to hire you is irrelevant.

Don't put your chances for success in the hands of a "professional resume writer.”
Why? Who knows better what the value of your career accomplishments are? You, or someone who hasn't even come close to having a career like yours? Would you leave the execution of your career responsibilities up to your assistant? Of course not. Then why would you consider letting someone else represent/articulate your career accomplishments and value proposition by letting them write your resume?

The only thing standing between you and being able to write a “pin sharp” resume is having access to the right tools. Our Career Executive Coaching process has helped hundreds of executives Maximize: Opportunity Exposure, Improve Interview Ability, and Capture Better Job Offers with Higher Compensation. To learn more, take a look at this introductory video on Vimeo: Ron Bates - Conversation about Career Executive Coaching - Executive Advantage Group. This career oriented executive coaching gives you the inside track on how construct a resume that opens doors to the best career opportunities. Feedback on the process has been great. And if you think you might benefit from some career counseling or coaching, email me.

If your resume doesn’t concisely articulate your unique and differentiated career value proposition, you’re dead before you even start. Sorry to be so blunt about it, but without an outstanding resume, you’ll simply get lost in the pile of resumes that end up in electronic or physical recycle bins without a second thought - let alone an interview.

You're about to engage in the biggest networking and marketing campaign project of your life. You need every business card, contact and email address you've ever collected. You want entrée to every trade show, symposia, conference, user group, industry-specific blog and website you can identify. You want access to additional contact information via free and subscription-based research services and databases. You have, ideally, memberships and a working familiarity with professional business networking environments.

Networking is the most effective tool you have to work with. This goes to the heart of the timing issue. You never know when a conversation, online or off, is going to reveal a job lead. The idea is to have as many “conversations” going as possible.

Just like some people have their favorite search engine, some people have their favorite networking site, and make the mistake of being "wedded" to a single networking site. This would be like attempting to build a house, and using the same type of saw in every application requiring a saw.

When you’re looking for networking opportunities, make your decisions based on criteria such as the membership demographics, the platform capabilities from which the members network, the nature of the networking being conducted on the site, the philosophy of the executive team that founded the networking site - you’ll quickly find all networking sites are certainly not equal. Each one has a unique aspect which can be leveraged to support a specific or ongoing networking need/objective.

If you really want to increase your ability to network, invest time in learning how to leverage the power of more than just your favorite networking site.

You can't simply focus on approaching recruiters and answering ads. Make sure your plan includes investing time in branding yourself personally on the Internet. The old adage of "those who fail to plan, plan to fail" is absolutely true in a proactive job search campaign. You can't simply focus on approaching recruiters. The Wall Street Journal even published an article on this a while back called: E-Mailing Resumes to Recruiters Won't Generate a Big Response.

There are a number of ways to do it.

Make sure your name comes up on the first page of search results when someone “googles” your name.

When someone searches your name on Google, what comes up? Most recruiters do this simple search before contacting an executive. Why? Because it’s a way to find out more about you than what your resume tells them. The trick is to create exposure for yourself on sites that are frequently indexed by Google, and have high page view numbers. And when your name does come up, the content it reveals should be impressive and relevant.

Blogs
The easiest way to create a robust and meaningful presence for yourself on the Internet is to write blogs. You can go to a number of free blog sites and create your own blog (e.g., www.Blogger.com).

Ecademy (www.Ecademy.com) is indispensible in this regard. Google "loves" this site because the content is constantly changing. If you sign up on Ecademy you can "blog your brains out,” writing as many articles for which you have time and relevant information to share – all of which typically will be “noticed” by Google on the same day you write it. In less than a month, and in some cases in as little as a single day, you’ll start to show up on Google first page results whenever someone searches your name. This is priceless from an exposure standpoint, and absolutely invaluable to a job seeker.

Ecademy's annual subscription it is about as close to free as you can get. No other networking site can compete with Ecademy in terms of how fast you can personally brand yourself on the Internet. Google even indexes your Ecademy Profile, and there’s virtually no limit to the amount of information you can put into it.

But blogging alone isn’t enough to get yourself on those first page search results.

LinkedIn
Make sure you have a robust profile on www.LinkedIn.com. The last time I checked there were over 200,000 staffing and recruiting professionals using LinkedIn as a database for candidates. I always tell people to specifically make sure their LinkedIn profile has as much "resume" information about their career as the character limited fields will allow. Why? Because those 200,000+ staffing and recruiting professionals will be more likely to see your profile when they do keyword searches to find candidates.

In addition, LinkedIn has almost 100 million members who might want to network with you. LinkedIn also allows you to link your public profile to other sites you should be using, like Facebook or www.online-resume.com, etc. This creates a spider web of cross-linked content that will drive your content to the first page of Google results even faster.

Remember, you’re conducting a direct marketing and networking campaign for yourself. If recruiters and hiring authorities/executives can't find you, you’ll miss out on a lot of opportunities. As a colleague once said to me, "If you can't be found on Google, do you even exist?"

here are hundreds of job posting sites out there, all with different information and formatting requirements, which can make managing your resume postings a very time-consuming process. Resume distribution services give you the ability to manage all of your resume postings from one convenient site/interface. This is called a resume distribution service.

It’s usually free to post a resume on a job posting site, but there are hundreds of them, all with different information and formatting requirements. It can be a full time job just managing your postings! Resume distribution services that target job posting sites give you the ability to manage all of your resume postings from one convenient site/interface.

The resume distribution services that target recruiters do just want you'd think - they send your resume out directly to thousands of recruiters, and some even let you focus on recruiters for specific industries or functional disciplines. But make sure you understand how this type of service can - or can’t - help you before you spend money on it. Try to get an idea if other candidates at your level are using them. Some services don't work as well for executives versus those who are in earlier career stages. Why? Because not a lot of recruiters are paying money to find people that are easier to identify, and executives are typically easier to identify.

Executive Job Sites like www.TheLadders.com, or Forbes "Best of the Web" winners like www.NetShare.com or www.ExecuNet.com, cater to executives who would prefer to present themselves more selectively to executive openings. Recruiters with jobs paying in excess of $100K/year post openings on sites like this, and job searchers aren’t the only ones who subscribe to them. Executives who may not necessarily be looking for a new job like to keep an eye on these to stay current on what's out there (the career equivalent of “window shopping”). These sites typically offer additional job search and career-oriented services based on subscription levels.

Reach out directly to hiring authorities efficiently and on a schedule with a desktop email campaign software solution that allows you to send formatted emails with attachments like your resume. (Outlook email merge does not allow you to send attachments.)

Who should you send your resume to? Well, it ultimately depends how aggressive you want to be. In the extreme, you ideally want to cover the earth by sending your resume out to every hiring authority/executive on the planet. Again, the success of your search is largely based on timing. Only a fraction of employers use outside search companies (retained or contingent). Most openings are filled through internal efforts.

OK, so how do you identify "everybody on the planet?" This comes back to step #2: Have right tools for the job. You want to think about every venue and every person you’ve ever come across as a possible source of contact information and names, and build your own personal job search campaign database.

Think like a recruiting researcher. You want to be able to identify a contact's name from one source (e.g., EVP Technology, John Doe speaking about XYZ technology from a trade show website speaker's list) and identify an email of someone else at the company (the press contact for the company: jane.doe@company.com) and be able to put the two together: john.doe@company.com. Will these really work? 70-80% of the time they will.

You can go onto some websites and identify literally thousands of employee names. Paste them into a spreadsheet and do some simple manipulation to create thousands of contact emails.

Buy a cheap email extraction tool such as Email Address Collector to pull all the email addresses you've communicated with or saved (e.g., in the spread sheet you just created) from every document, file, and email (To, From, CC, and BCC) on your computer.

Identify as many relevant sources of contact information as possible. There are many that are industry specific and free (e.g., Media Post will expose you to tens of thousands of media & entertainment direct contact emails for free).

www.Lead411.com is a great and inexpensive database of direct downloadable contact information for 50,000 Companies and 200,000 executives. As a comparison, contact identification research typically costs $45 to $100 - $200 per name or per hour. You can purchase and download their list of the 1500 largest company contacts for a reasonable price. Sites like Lead411 and ZoomInfo may also give you a free trial for a week or 24 hours. You can find a lot of information in even 24 hours for free.

There are also recruiter databases and sources of contact information. www.SelectRecruiters.com is somewhat of a hybrid resume distribution database of recruiters, and then there is the industry standard "big red book" of recruiters at www.RecruiterRedbook.com. Both of these services/product offerings are from the folks at Kennedy Information who've been around for decades and have been tracking the recruiting industry.

www.Hoovers.com will expose you an unbelievable amount of companies and names, but no direct contact information.

Many sources of information will also lead you to other sources of direct contact information. And there are many, many more that you can identify on the Internet. Some are free, and some are subscription based.

If you’re looking to save money, you can even trade business contacts at www.Jigsaw.com, an online business contact marketplace where marketers, recruiters, and sales people can buy, sell and trade business contact information. Jigsaw has millions of contacts at over 100s of thousands of companies.

Collect all of these contacts into your email campaign management tool and start sending your “pin sharp” resume out into the world.

As your search progresses, you’ll be leaving lots of voicemail messages and connecting with people that haven't scheduled the time to speak with you. You must be able to state your purpose for the call and articulate your core value proposition quickly. 30 seconds is actually a long voicemail when you’re talking at a reasonable pace. Most people are visually-oriented, not auditory. You’ll lose people if you don’t have a strategy for communicating your message concisely.

If you need to, practice with a script. And smile when you leave a voicemail. This may sound silly, but it comes across in your voice and keeps it from sounding like a recording. Practice on friends and family members. Remember, someone might actually answer the phone when you call, and you don't want to sound like you're reading off a telemarketing script. Also have a message for an executive assistant prepared and practiced for obvious reasons.

And remember: Whenever leaving a voicemail do not simply leave your phone number. Make sure you give your email address as well as your phone number, and speak s-l-o-w-l-y when you do. I'm always amazed when people leave voicemail messages that are easy to understand, right up until they start giving me their contact information at the speed of light.

It takes 10 times less effort for someone to respond to you via email than via voicemail. This is why you should always include your email address in any voicemail you leave. By doing so you dramatically increase your chances of getting a response, and as a result, getting into a future dialog with the person. I respond to 100% of the email I get.

Don’t forget to add the people you communicate with to your Outlook address book and/or SPAM filter's approved email contacts! I wish I had a dollar for every candidate that sent me an email who forgot to add me to their list of approved email contacts.

Many people don't understand what a recruiter does and doesn't do. It differs from country to country, but for the most part, the following is true: recruiters are not agents for candidates; they are agents for clients. To put it another way: recruiters don't find jobs for people; they find people for jobs.

Nothing makes a phone call shorter or gets an email deleted faster than approaching a recruiter and telling them you want to discuss "how we can work together.”

The only real way you are going to get any recruiter’s attention is if, based on timing, you happen to come along with the right requirements for a position they’re actively trying to fill.

Reality check #1: Recruiters are some of the busiest people on the planet. Good ones are also some of the hardest-working people you will ever meet. Many recruiters regularly work 12-hour days, 6 days a week or more. Why? Because timing is everything on the opportunity side as well as on the candidate side, and time kills all deals. It’s also a bandwidth issue – the faster a recruiter can fill a search the more searches they can do in a year, and therefore the more income they can generate.

My phone rings at least once every 10 minutes. Many recruiters don't even answer the phone if it isn't a scheduled call. Why? Because they'd never get anything done if they had a conversation with every unsolicited candidate that called them. It’s just an unfortunate reality that many unsolicited candidates never receive a return phone call or an email acknowledging a resume submission or attempt at communication with a recruiter. Don't take it personally.

Reality check #2: We’re really busy. A recruiter's life revolves around the phone and email. I've never met an executive that really had to deal with the volume of voicemail and email recruiters have to deal with.

Want to increase your chances of connecting with a recruiter? Make it easy for them to communicate with you! Send them an email; don't just leave them a voicemail. Why? Emails are infinitely easier to respond to than a voicemail. And when you do send an email, briefly state your purpose and attach your “pin sharp” resume. Don't tell your life story in the body of the email. Don't cut and paste your resume into the body text of the email. Don't give an executive summary in the body text of the email. Don't attach additional documents like bio's, PowerPoint presentations, articles, and other unsolicited information that a recruiter doesn't have the time to read. Just attach your resume.

There is also -never- any reason to send a recruiter an email and not attach your resume if you aren't already in dialog.

Reality check #3: Recruiters can end up seeing hundreds of resumes a day. Did I mention your resume should be "pin sharp?” Did I mention you should always attach a resume even in a follow-up email to an unresponsive recruiter? Even if a recruiter took the time to respond to your email or voicemail there is still a very good chance they have not actually seen/read or saved your resume.

When a recruiter does give you the time of day, take a second to acknowledge their busy reality, acknowledge the fact you are ambushing them with an unscheduled call if that's the case, and then get to the point. Give them your 30-Second Elevator Pitch. Don't tell them your life story. Ask them if they’d like to know more. Ask them the best way and when to follow-up, or if they'd like to schedule some time.

The following is huge!

Ask the recruiter if they might benefit from being connected to any of your contacts based on the current search portfolio the recruiter is working on - even if you don't map into it. You are making a networking call when contacting a recruiter.

Realize there is a very slim chance they are currently working on a search that you will map into (it would kind of be like getting struck by lightning), and focus on extending a helping hand – and they will remember you. It is far more likely that you’re in a position to help them with one of their searches based on who you know than they’ll be working on a project you map into. Did I mention that this was a networking project? Remember this is all based on timing. They will hopefully remember you and reach out to you when they are working on an opportunity you might map into. Oh, and get this: they might actually know a hiring authority with a need you might fit - even though they have no association with the search. I've introduced many candidates to clients that had needs I was aware of, even though there was nothing in it for me other than sheer "good will.”

If you approach recruiters this way there is a much greater chance they will call you when the timing is right.

Decide how often to send out your resume to the different populations you’re targeting. Connect with a given number of recruiters or hiring authorities/executives on a regular basis, but be careful not to spend too much time with any one person if there is no identified job opportunity to discuss. Don't get sucked into just shooting the breeze with any of your networking contacts.

If your goal is to connect with a given number of recruiters or hiring authorities/executives, be careful not to spend too much time with any one person if there is no identified job opportunity to discuss. That said, don't skip the part where you offer to help them!

If the call was not scheduled, then by definition you are ambushing someone. If you do connect with someone worth spending more time with, schedule an appointment for a follow-up call. If you don't do this, you risk having no control of your productivity.

Depending one what statistics you look at, some say It takes on average between 60 - 120 days to fill most searches, and some say 90 - 180 days. If you're not sending your resume to recruiters or hiring authority/executives at least once a quarter, then you are going to miss out on opportunities from a timing perspective. And follow-up by email. As I've said, don't simply leave voicemails for people - they require more time and effort to respond to than email.

Seasonality
Most searches are conducted in the 1st quarter of a calendar year when companies have new hiring budgets. The 2nd quarter of the year is almost as busy as the 1st. The 3rd quarter is the slowest quarter of the year because it's summer and people are away, and because most hiring needs have been filled for the year. The 4th quarter starts to pick up again for companies that haven't filled still-open positions. They realize they’re at risk of losing their recruiting budgets, and because they want to capture employees that will actually be ready to start work at the beginning of the coming new year.

Conducting a proactive job search can be one of the most stressful and frustrating jobs experiences you’ve ever had. Like with any job, you need to take breaks and have some balance maintain fresh perspective, stay focused, and keep your determination and spirits up. Reward yourself for…

Getting your resume done

Getting an email campaign out

Getting an interview scheduled

Above all, don’t forget to celebrate when you take that next step in your career as a result of all the great opportunities you've exposed yourself to by conducting a well-thought-out and proactive job search campaign!

Pay it forward… Was this article of value to you? Do you think you’re going to implement any of my advice? Do you think you would actually use any of the tools mentioned above? If the answer to any of the preceding was "yes,” then the best way to get started is by "paying it forward." Share this article on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.